Liberal Democrats: Clegg's wheel of fire

By far the biggest political challenge for Nick Clegg over the coming months is whether he can carry his party and the country for the deficit reduction programme that George Osborne will unveil in a month's time. To do that, Mr Clegg must persuade his activists and voters that the cuts are an unavoidable necessity forced on the coalition by bond markets and Labour misjudgment, and that it is not a Thatcher 2.0 programme of ideological slash and burn. It is a gamble with very high stakes for Mr Clegg, the Liberal Democrats and, indeed, the British people. Yesterday at his party conference in Liverpool, Mr Clegg made a bold shot at making the case. The party, for the moment, seemed satisfied. However, the country's judgment may still be years away.

Mr Clegg cannot be accused of caution. If the pre-briefing was to be believed, he would use the speech to defend the coalition with the Conservatives while making it clear that he would be equally in the market for a deal with Labour if circumstances permitted. In the event, there was no explicit equidistance about the Lib Dems' future approach. Admittedly, nothing about a possible emerging relationship, if any, between the Lib Dems and Labour will be clear until Labour has a new leader.

However, Mr Clegg was extremely bullish about the virtues of the current deal with the Tories — it was more than the sum of its parts, he claimed, and Mr Clegg clearly believes coalition government to be inherently better than single-party rule. As a result, the speech did less than it should have done to reassure left-of-centre opinion that the Lib Dem leader has an open mind on the progressive alliance which most party activists say, surely rightly, they would prefer if circumstances allowed. Occasionally there is a political recklessness in Mr Clegg with echoes of Tony Blair.

There were nevertheless many parts of the speech that were strong, welcome and responsive to the criticisms Mr Clegg has endured since May. He was positive on civil liberties and new politics, especially on local government spending. He gave liberal Britain solid reasons to be proud of the party's new place in power and he made a powerful case, even if some will never be able to stomach it, for why the party had little alternative but to make the deal that David Cameron offered in May. Ultimately, though, everything about the Conservative-Lib Dem deal rests on the deficit reduction strategy. Mr Clegg, repeatedly pleading with his nervous followers to hold their nerve and stick with it, knows it. He did not come into politics to make cuts, he insisted. But whether they like it or not, that's where he and the Lib Dems are now. They are bound upon a wheel of fire.